rostasi

Yeah, that's what I meant. Try another band.

Have you tried another band? They only put out 2 rather uninspiring albums about 5 years ago.

Well, that's some heavy stupid shit there ... and that kinda crap is de rigueur in lots of areas these days.

I still am trying to wrap my head arout Matt "IT Crowd" Berry as an Acid Jazz musician!

I think I owned every JTQ disc - both CD and LP - I could get my hands on back then!

Everything associated with Acid Jazz sounded like a party to me! Isn't that what "Jazz Dance" was all about? ... and, yeah, that was my point about the 10 year or so gap between Acid Jazz and Neo Soul.

What were you expecting? "Spoken Word" is what I've seen for her most of the time.

You have to point the flashlight outwards (unless you're trying to scare someone).

Acid Jazz was party music born in the mid-80s mostly out of London with a more improv feeling mixing jazz, soul, and hip-hop with a stylish feel. Neo-soul, OTOH, came out of Philly in the mid-90s and was/is less about dancefloor moves and a lot about personal, intimate songwriting with serious influence from hip-hop's lyrical stylings and rhythm. Racist attitudes from corporate moneymakers is a whole other thing tho and a continuing "nadir" when it comes to the music biz. Genre labels are kind of like old trail signs in a forest. When the paths were simple, a sign pointing "Jazz" or "Rock" made perfect sense. Now the forest has exploded into thickets and hybrid gardens, and everyone’s building weird new paths, so yeah, the signs are messier. But if you’re inside one of those new trails, the sign matters a lot. It tells your little corner of the world where you are. The explosion of styles isn’t just noise - it’s culture evolving in real time.

I remember jazz acts a-plenty that I'd read about in the British papers, so I looked it up: so maybe you missed them on the nights you went (?) Well, they're meaningful to some folks out there - mainly because the crossover influences make the styles stray out of tight genres that some folks want.

I don't know where "sub-style(s)" fit in this because it's this influence (influx?) of modern R&B meeting Soul with a hiphop groove with funky jazz instruments that makes it what it is ... and it doesn't have to have all of that in equal measures, so that might be why you were surprised to hear that Ocean might fit that style.

Yeah, but nearly all of the bands/people you mentioned are mainly Acid Jazz performers (incl. Michiru) or NuJazz (except for 4hero which would be closer to Jazzstep or hardcore breakbeat).

Yeah, sure. Folks like him and Solange, Anderson .Paak, Hiatus Kaiyote, SZA, and so on have varying doses of neo-soul in what they do. Highly constricted genres are a rare thing anymore.

Yes!

Well, those folks sit in the middle. You had acid jazz influence, then someone like Meshell Ndegeocello, then Badu and Jill Scott, then you had it connect more with hiphop, then it connected (Frank Ocean, for instance) with alternative R&B, then...

Example? 25 Neo-Soul Artists Reshaping Contemporary Soul in 2025 There's always the Swedish version:

yeah, the style hasn't changed much in 30 years except for new technologies.

I think it's still "neo-soul."